Earlier today, I downloaded Earache’s new, completely free Extreme Stage Diving app, a video game in which “you take control of a burly bouncer and throw the pesky stage invader as far into the crowd as possible.” And I’m happy to report that it’s going to make an excellent time waster (that’s a compliment), and may soon usurp Slayer Pinball (or whatever the fuck it’s called) as my favorite metal-themed smartphone procrastination tool. It’s simple yet challenging, it appeals to my 8-bit sensibilities, there’s plenty of blood, and, oh yeah, the soundtrack is killer.

Yes, of course, this is meant to help Earache promote their shit. But the game features a bare minimum of songs by Earache bands I don’t like (cough, Oceano, cough cough), and those songs are more than offset by the inclusion of groups like At the Gates, Deicide, Brutal Truth, Decapitated, and Wormrot. And whomever designed the game was smart/cool enough to make it so that you can skip to whichever of the ten featured songs you like — in other words, if Bonded by Blood comes up and you don’t like Bonded by Blood, you can easily move along to The Haunted or whatever your particular cup of tea might be. (And apparently there’s a bonus track that you can unlock, but I haven’t gotten that far yet. I’m hoping it’s a Godflesh song, even though that would make no mothertruckin’ sense whatsoever.)

Check out a sample video below…

If you go here and give Earache your e-mail address, you can also potentially win the helmet the charcter in the game wears, although I think the game itself is a much cooler prize, and you don’t need to enter no contest to get it.

You can download the game here. Like I said, it’s totally free, so you really have nothing to lose by trying it out (other than the time you’re going to spend playing this instead of doing something productive). And you can get the full track list after the jump.

Click to read more…

Banner Designed by Cysquatch

Welcome to “Question of the Week,” a (sometimes) weekly debate amongst the MetalSucks staff regarding a recent hot button issue.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, which means we’re taking off early today and won’t be back ’til Monday. We’re sorry to leave non-American readers high n’ dry, but PLUS ONE FOR FREEDOM, MOTHERFUCKERS.

ANYWAY, in honor of the holiday, we decided to do a special Turkey Day-themed QOTW designed to make you feel all warm and cuddly inside:

WHAT (IN METAL) ARE YOU THANKFUL FOR?

The MS staff’s answers after the jump.

Click to read more…

In case you can’t tell by all the posting I’ve been doing about the soundtrack, I really wanna see The Social Network. It’s just like the story of how MetalSucks was created, only we didn’t go to ivy league schools, we’re not billionaires, and we haven’t sued each other (yet). How dare David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin steal our life story!

Speaking of our life story, here’s how we amused ourselves this week:

• We debuted new music by The Fucking Wrath.
• Intronaut’s Sacha Dunable wondered if America really has any talent, The Red Chord’s Greg Weeks discussed the NFL with Job for a Cowboy’s Charn, and Daath’s Eyal Levi taught us about proper etiquette for being a houseguest.
• We spoke to Eric Guenther from From Exile and the new Daath album.
• We checked out new releases by The Serpent & The Siren as well as Mutant Supremacy, Pyrrhon and Parasitic Extirpation.
• We found out that way more of you like nu-metal than we thought.
• We learned how to look like a hot metal chick.
• We bemoaned the latest batch of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominees.
• We watched the new Cephalic Carnage video and now we’re afraid we’ll never get a boner again.
• We got excited about the first awesome tour of 2011.
• We declared Cradle of Filth to be a glam band now.

Have a good weekend, folks. See ya Monday!

-AR

I keep forgetting that it’s basically October already, ’cause the weather here in New York has still been, by and large, quite warm — but there ya have it. The year is rapidly drawing to its conclusion.

And so now we’re talking about shows for next year. But at least those shows sound potentially killer.

So. Deicide have apparently completed work on their new album, To Hell with God, which was produced by the great Mark Lewis and should be out sometime next year. While we wait, they’ve announced a headlining trek with support coming from Belphegor, Blackguard, Neuraxis, and Pathology. That is a not-at-all shabby line-up, wouldn’t you say? And it’s DEI-FUCKING-CIDE. You know you wanna go.

Dates after el jumperooni.

Click to read more…

A while ago I got linked, I’m pretty sure it was from here, to this blog entry by a dude who calls himself Metallikris on his imaginatively-titled Metalliblog, in which he rates every metal musician of note that he’s met on a scale of 1 to 10 based on how nice they were to him. Now while I have a captive audience, that I can only assume our fine friend Metallikris is amongst (because he writes about this site on his blog), I would just like to ask…

What the fuck?

These people work their arses (ah-hem, asses. Sorry yanks) off for decades learning to play their instruments, fight the ridiculous uphill battle to start a band, do something original and actually get some recognition for it, do insane hours on tour, and then somehow their entire worth as a human being can be quantatively measured by how they deal with you wanting to get your photo taken with them after they’ve gotten offstage? What in the hell have you have you ever done in your life that gives you the divine power to judge ANYONE that way, let  alone talented, hardworking musicians who do things you never could?

When you say that Ralph Santolla should “get cancer quick!”or that Willie Adler’s wife is “probably fucking the local milkman”, you’re talking shit on real human beings in the name of getting some second-hand attention, and that’s just weak. And are you really surprised that Fredrik Akesson from Opeth was maybe just a little pissed off that you mistook him for Peter Lindgren, the guy he replaced in the band?

Now at this point I could drag out your self-edited imdb actor page or your hilariously self-important twitter account and let the metalsucks maniacs have their way with them, but instead I’m going to just say this:

Get a reality check, dude.

-Crack Hitler

I don’t watch Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC program on a regular basis the way I once did; if I was still a frequent viewer, though, I might have seen this little bit about the RNC’s decision to hold their 2012 National Convention in Tampa, and Maddow’s subsequent discussion of death metal. Instead, I only came across the clip ’cause reader Nikhil Krishnaswamy sent it to us. Thanks, Nikhil!

Maddow seems to be implying that death metallers from around the area are gonna make life a living hell for the Republicans, but I think that’s overly optimistic. There’s obviously a political component to death metal (I mean burning a fucking inverted cross into your noggin is a political statement as much as it’s an act of shock theater), but I don’t exactly see the members of Deicide and Obituary holding a protest rally outside the convention anytime soon, do you?

Meanwhile, it’s interesting to note that this isn’t Maddow’s first dalliance with metal. For one thing, there’s this:

Click to read more…

I can’t quite believe this is real; it looks like the kind of crappy promo vid unsigned and never-will-be-signed bands send us on a near-daily basis, but this video is actually for Order of Ennead, which features Deicide drummer Steve Asheim, and will be releasing their second album, An Examination of Being, in the spring via Earache.

And the real bitch of it is that the song, “The Concept of Our Extinction,” is actually pretty rockin’…

-AR

[via Metal Underground]

I don’t remember where I read this, but I seem to recall a story about ABBA – yes, ABBA – demoing each of their songs in every conceivable musical style, just to make sure that the inevitable Swede disco-pop version was, in fact, the track putting its best foot forward. In other words, somewhere out there, Björn Ulvaeus and company are sitting on tapes that feature a calypso version of “Dancing Queen,” a country version of “Mamma Mia,” a metal version of “S.O.S.” It would be kind of amazing if ABBA ever released those tapes, but I guess that might endanger the success of Mamma Mia 2: Holy Shit I Can’t Believe Meryl Streep Did This AGAIN.

Helloween don’t have a movie franchise based on hit Broadway show based on their music, though, so for their new greatest hits collection, Unarmed, they are, in fact, “re-imagining” all of their most famous shit. These might not be old demos (rather, they’re new re-workings), but I’m still pretty curious to see how their fan base reacts to, say, a dance version of “If I Could Fly.”

And I’m not making that shit up. Noisecreep is currently streaming a dance version of “If I Could Fly.”

Are Helloween fans open-minded people? Since it’s power metal, are they resigned to its natural cheesiness and not that bothered by the concept of a techno re-do? Or are they gonna get their panties in a twist the way, say, Deicide fans probably would if Glen Benton suddenly hired Telefon Tel Aviv to remix “Dead by Dawn?” I guess we’re about to find out.

And here’s the original “If I Could Fly,” in case ya don’t know it:

Unarmed comes out March 30 on The End.

-AR

God bless corny ’80s PSAs and news pieces. Thanks to Shelby Cobras of Illogical Contraption for this one.

-VN

First of all, for our non-Chosen readers: groyse metsie is Yiddish for a bargain. Don’t say I never taught ya nuthin’.

So. For the month of October (or “Rocktober,” as some clever marketing types are dubbing it), Earache is offering a whole bunch of truly righteous albums from their catalog for download on iTunes at a retardedly low price: $5.99 in the U.S., £4.49 in the U.K., and 4,99EUR in Europe. (The press release tells me that “prices may vary in other regions.” Ha-ha.) Now, I know that most of us music snobs don’t like iTunes because the audio quality isn’t as high as it could be, and there’s a better-than-average chance that a lot of you own most of these albums anyway. But if you can get past the whole “IT’S NOT AS GOOD AS FLAC! Snort snort” thing and/or for some reason DO NOT already own most of these albums, it’s a really, really killer deal.

A complete list of available albums after the jump. At least six or seven of these are classics, and nine or so are still awesome and could be classics, so they’re totally worth the six bucks or whatever.

And then one of them is by Oceano.

Click to read more…

While our government has used death metal to torture and interrogate prisoners, classically trained pianist-turned-music therapist Arthur Bloom has discovered that the br00tlest of the br00tal can actually serve another, more positive purpose: helping injured veterans of the war in Iraq recover from serious injuries.

Click to read more…

Up to this point, the Obituary that reunited in 2003 only bothered to resuscitate their exasperating tendencies. After two, um, unsatisfactory outings, a third post-reunion album must feel like a potential strike three to many. And like the ’05 and ’07 albums, 2009’s Darkest Day can be painfully simplistic and inattentively performed. But unlike those dull albums that preceded it, Darkest Day has stretches of greatness (at least 24 bars of most songs), a pair of classics (“Payback,” “Your Darkest Day“), their best-ever album closer (The Crown-hinted “Left To Die”), and brilliant performances from the inimitable John Tardy and frowny lead guitarist Ralph Santolla.

Click to read more…

Noisecreep have unveiled their list of the Top 10 Death Metal Debut Albums (although the list is in no particular order), courtesy Friend of MetalSucks, Carlos Ramirez.

And for once, I don’t actually have any complaints. The list is pretty good.

That being said, I’m sure you folks will find something to bitch about, so… have at it!!!

-AR

Alright. Last week one of you e-mailed me to tell me about this story (and my apologies that I don’t know your name – I’ve lost quite a lot of e-mails in this weekend’s server transfer), in which Obituary guitarist Trevor Peres revealed that his band has been trying to put together a package tour with great old school Floridian death metal bands including (beside Obituary, natch) Deicide, Morbid Angel, Six Feet Under… and Cannibal Corpse?

Click to read more…

Long time readers of this site should be fully aware that I was addicted to the initial season of Rock of Love, VH1′s completely fucktarded reality show in which Poison singer/wig wearer Bret Michaels basically moved into a mansion with a large amount of not especially attractive (or smart or personable or nice or any other quality one generally looks for in other human beings) sluts and makes them all do ridiculous things to determine which one is his one true love (And by “one true love,” I mean… I don’t know what I mean. It seems like Michaels fucks all the girls anyway, so what’s the fucking point?).

But I basically lost interest two episodes into season two. Like pretty much every reality show I’ve ever tried to watch (which, admittedly, is only three – hello Project Greenlight and The Apprentice), the gimmick go old quickly. Maybe watching a different washed up hair metal star make some groupies of Gumpian intellect jump through hoops for the chance to suck his cock would have kept me interested; as it stood, I’d had enough.

I’m not sure which season Rock of Love is on now – I think it might be the third, and I think it’s on a bus now, or some shit – but it looks like Deicide mainman/generally all around scary dude Glen Benton caught a few episodes, and, it should surprise no one to learn, he was not amused.

Click to read more…

Those uproarious chaps over at Metal Inquisition have compiled what they claim to be the Ultimate Florida Death Metal Mix (and, really, it’s tough to argue with them). The maverick known only as “Gene Hoglan’s Balls” writes:

“I love all kinds of death metal, but if I had to pick just one to listen to for the rest of my life it would be Florida Death Metal. And if I could only listen to one song from each of my favorite Florida Death Metal bands for the rest of my life I would come up with Metal Inquisition’s Ultimate Florida Death Metal Mix. If you’re a fan of Florida Death Metal, then you will love this. If you don’t know anything about Florida Death Metal, then prepare to be schooled.”

Fair enough. Lucky for all of you mavericks, copyright laws mean little to nothing these days, so the mix is avail as a free download. Get the full track listing and links to the download after the jump.

Click to read more…

Metal Injection posted the below British television spot for Till Death Do Us Part, Deicide’s latest (read my review here), and while some might think it reps a new low in marketing techniques, I think it’s pretty much the best t.v. ad I’ve ever seen for a metal album (and possibly just the best t.v. ad I’ve ever seen period). I mean, that old dude who says “Yes, I agree, this is their fastest and most brutal album yet?” PRICELESS.

-AR

Look: after nearly 20 years of making brutal death metal, Deicide ain’t exactly trying to reinvent the wheel. So while “The Beginning of the End,” the opening track of their latest offering, Till Death Do Us Part, is kind of surprising (it’s a slow, moody instrumental, as foreboding as the title would suggest, that is unsettling and in no way beautiful, like the negative version of the intro to every American New Wave album this century), everything after is exactly what you’d expect from these fearsome Floridians. Chuck Klosterman once suggested that the reason the Sunshine State spawned so much awesome death metal is because constantly being surrounded by old people makes one think about death all the time; maybe all that ponderin’ of the great beyond also makes these dudes desperate to maintain their youth, and so they just keep making the same album they did in 1990 over and over again.

In any case, it’s a moot point, ’cause like AC/DC before them and Children of Bodom after, the fact that they’re usually pretty good slides them from the “boh-ring” column to the one labeled “dependable.”

Click to read more…

[Via Metal Inquistion]

-AR

After I interviewed Deicide skinsman Steve Asheim a couple of weeks ago, I went back and listened to The Stench of Redemption for what must have been the first time in like a year. And you know what? The album still slays, and it just made me even more excited for the release of Deicide’s latest, ‘Till Death Do Us Part, which hits shelves April 28 in Europe and May 13 here in the States.

So now the band has made the title track avail as a free download on their MySpace page. And you know what? When Asheim told me that “A lot of people thought that Stench was too melodic and I think ‘Till Death has definitely tweaked that,” he wasn’t kidding. This track just relentlessly pummels, dude; Asheim’s drums are the aural equivalent of getting the shit kicked out of you by a drunk biker outside a bar you had no business being in in the first fuckin’ place. I’m saying it’s a good song.

It’s only April and it’s already turning out to be an awesome year for death metal; after new releases by Hate Eternal, Origin, and Arsis, ‘Till Death should be the next release on your “must own” list.

-AR